Xerox Alto Restoration Part 10 - solving the crashes, first look at the GUI
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- Опубліковано 8 вер 2024
- We solve the crashing problem, which was due to a Control ROM / CRAM board mismatch. Which allows us to finally run the diagnostic test suite. Which gives us a clean bill of heath! If we only had a mouse that worked, we could use the Alto! PARC, whose support has been unwavering, lends us an original mouse on the spot later that day, and I get to try the famed GUI for the first time.
As usual, more technical details in Ken's blog entry:
www.righto.com/...
Bravo :) congratulations to all on your teamwork in getting the Alto running.
Is that machine from 1973 ?
That is absolutely insane how far ahead it was from anything else available at that time.
It's hard to believe. Amazing.
This is an absolutely amazing series of videos! You really have the know how and patience to hunt down all the issues with the Alto and it is rather entertaining to follow you during that process. And I really like your documentary style of doing the videos, go on like this!
Cool to see the Alto is up and running again.
Excellent fault-finding. You guys know your stuff, and I'm glad you documented your work for us all to enjoy.
I love the way it puts .RUN at the end of the program name. That draw program is really strange, but very cleverly written
Congratulations on getting the GUI working - It's an amazing machine for it's time :D
I suspect the drawing program is vector based (or at least stores the image in vector form). Thus when you freehand something, it approximates an equation that best fits the pattern and stores that instead of the raw pixel locations you initially define. I would imagine this to be the case as vector files take less space in memory to represent the same information than pixel based files.
Congrats ! what a piece of history ! incredible work :) i hope this isn't the last part of the alto ! just amazing to see what was possible back then. Greetings from germany
So fantastic to watch - I've been following since early on - thanks for sharing.
Quite fantastic, I wish I had friends like yours :D Enjoying your channel very much, Marc; it is so nice to see these machines get some TLC. The love for technology has inspired me to continue work with one of my own abandoned projects this entire week. Cheers!
Congratulations! Incredible work finally getting the Alto to work. It was amazingly advanced at the time, perhaps somewhat ahead of its time?
this is going quite well!
Congratulations! Lots of hard work went into getting it up and running!
Sweet, that drawing program is actually really cool!
Wow, congratulations. So cool to see 'draw' working.
Now all you need to do is reproduce kits to build one of these at home!
akspa0 For a "DIY" processor, check out the Megaprocessor. Using nothing but hundreds of thousands of transistors (and LEDs for debugging), a guy built a processor from scratch that's the size of his living room.
akspa0 or you can just run the emulator, somehow I don't think that many people would be queueing up to buy one of these for ~$30k or whatever it would cost to make at quantity, let alone the much higher price as small series.
These have been so cool to watch. Great work!
Congratulations! Awesome effort rewarded!
congrats that was awesome!! i know u guys were having lots of fun i wish i was there..
Wait...so the optical mouse has been around since the late 70s? I wonder why it took so long for it to become mainstream?
Cost was the reason it took a long time to be mainstream. Xerox tried to interest Apple in licensing an optical mouse for the Mac but they stuck with mechanical. They didn't move to optical mouse until the state of semiconductor tech permitted the creation of the 16 pixel sensor chip.
So, how did early optical mouses compared to mechanical mouses? Like in precision, speed, and lag.
Precision wasn't much of a factor, screen resolutions were very low.
Speed depended on your configuration, most of the time it was connected to a serial port and was controlled directly.
Lag? That wasn't a thing. Early mice were for drawing and document editing.
The early Alto mice were mechanical, and Al Kossow and Alan Kay just reminded us that there were quite a few revisions of them. The first optical mouse for the Alto came in 1980, and did necessitate the design of an entirely novel IC that had a 16 pixels sensor, and implemented a very clever, rudimentary non-linear neural network (!). That's apparently the one we have here. It works only on a mouse pad with a special pattern of dots. Still, it was yet another Xerox PARC first, way ahead of its time. Optical mice only became widespread much, much later, when an elaborate IC with CMOS detectors and way more pixels, correlation engines, and VCSEL lasers became practical and cost effective (the chip was made by HP/Avago, and you probably have one of its variants in your mouse today).
CuriousMarc Xerox PARC: The Tesla of our time.
The WYSIWYG word processor and draw programs look quite interesting. They don't seem to have a "refined" feel, and seem to be more of a proof-of-concept.
As an aside, I am beginning to wish computer monitors were vertically-oriented as standard, with GUIs adjusted accordingly. Looks like it would be extremely good for word processing (which I heard is why Xerox designed it like that in the first place).
Draw operations from an era where they had the luxury of real science; real academia at its finest last hours.
( that is a challenge; prove me wrong )
The original PS/2 mouse also used mechanical tracking; it used mechanical quadrature encoders made by Omron (if I remember right).
The MAC ancestor ! Well done.
Will it Crysis? Nevertheless - what these guys are doing is pure retro awesomeness. Thats kinda passion, right?
If using the mouse gets too tedious: From how the schematic looks like, it *seems* that the mouse could be replaced (electrically) with an old Commodore Amiga Mouse with a simple interface (buttons were "short to GND" on the Amiga & the mouse had quadrature outputs for the two axes.
I used an Amiga and remember the mouse was quite usable and working fine on a normal desk.
A Logitech P7 should work. Pretty much quadrature TTL mouse with 3 buttons
We should be able to adapt the cabling and use the Lyon optical mouse.
I went over some of the learning programs in place store and the one says a little ago when it should be a little while ago so you need to check the programming is well but the words back to what they were supposed to be instead of what they changed them to be
Was the operating system itself graphical? Wit icons that you could start programs for, overlapping windows and the like. I mean you start programs in a command-line. Was this due to the mouse not working first or was this the way you started programs on it?
Feels a lot more like what you did in some DOS environments in the 80;s when you used a mouse before windows was released. (I didn't watch all of the video, just wanted to see what the OS was like on the first GUI OS.)
The OS itself is command line. However there is a mouse driven file browser, but we hadn't tried it yet for lack of mouse. From the little I have seen, it does not have a "Desktop" metaphor with icons you can drag around, as you'll later find in the Macintosh (and the Xerox Star I think). More coming when we get to it.
So it really wasn't a full fledged GUI-based OS then! I mean for "Common people" the biggest breakthrough in user friendliness was when the OS itself was 100% GUI/mouse driven. Guess the memory constraints were too big to allow this to run in the background all the time!
Still it's fascinating what they could do graphically in the mid 70;s once you started a program! The draw program was really interesting and unusual!
Great Work Team This Is An Amazing Part Of History & Because Of You Gentlemen Generations More Can See It In Action
Also Xerox Should Be A PC Manufacturer But Some Unscrupulous Individuals Openly Stole There Ideas & Capitalized.
Not quite. Xerox bought stock in Apple. If I remember right, Apple was to manufacture the hardware and Xerox was to provide the software.
There were many things at the Palo Alto Research Center which were never shown to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
Very nice! I guess the next step for Xerox was GEM in 1984. And... why can´t we get a shutdown Saturn on our mobile phones?
Is the Draw program considered bit mapped graphics? As you may know Star had bit mapped graphics drawing and basic graphics in which you could drop drop in shapes, lines etc. It was not really a free hand drawing package.
The bouncing Saturn Icon must have been the very first Xerox Brush aka BrushDMT!
Now all you need is a transceiver and a "drop cable" for XNS :)
Alto ran PUP on "Experimental" 3 Mbit Ethernet. Ken is working on a 3 - 10 Mbit bridge
When you type 'quit' it starts the Diagnostic Memory Test program. Early Altos had lots of problems with memory, so they wrote a program that would report memory errors to the network so they maintanence techs would know if a machine was having problems. A favorite thing was for people to put their own icon into DMT. I've seen several different ones on DMT running at different places
It is under development by Ken Shirriff
Well, from what I see in the video, the Draw program is a vector graphics program, as it allows you to handle the parts of the drawing as separate objects that can be moved, copied and such.
Of course, the actual display hardware seems to be purely raster/bitmap based, so the image is not displayed with vector graphics.
Just beautiful!
I want over some of the learning programs in place store and the one says a little ago when it should be a little while ago so you need to check the programming is well but the words back to what they were supposed to be instead of what they changed them to be
what a talented crew! that machine gave up a good fight, but you guys won. I wonder how long it has been since that machine actually ran applications? whats next for the Alto?
Last time it ran would have been the mid/late 80's. It was part of an educational donation that PARC made to Stanford. MIT and the University of Rochester also received Altos, a file server, and a laser printer.
Neal elliott I'd hope they donate it to the Computer History Museum when it's all done
I'd love to see the Smalltalk environment up and write a little program!
Smalltalk 80 is running on the machines at LCM, which is why they needed 3K for this machine.. to get ST-80 to work
Those mechanical encoders in the mouse are frickin' crazy. Why their outputs go directly to the buttons though, or are there ICs underneath them? Why there's so much wipers, they seem like they should be just paralleled for reliability, but they aren't?
Anyway, this is SO COOL, OMG
It's amazing to me that such a mouse can work reliably. BTW Hawley Mouse House was the first company to successfully market a computer mouse.
douro20 "It's amazing to me that such a mouse can work reliably."
Ditto :)
The earliest mouse I had was "Марсианка", it was a mouse for БК-0010 Soviet home computer. I wish I stll had it, my dad took it apart ages ago :(
There's a schematic on archive.org (archive.org/details/bitsavers_xeroxaltosatics_5668836, click right 6 times or so) all switches and also the decoder outputs go to R/S flipflops to debounce them.
Output is 1 TTL signal for each button, and two (I/Q) for each axis.
Christian Vogel Ah, I see, thank you :)
Now that I think of it, this circuit is not unfamiliar to me, I remember using that debouncing techique a few years back to make a momentary power button for ATX power supply...
Mechanical encoders got to two ICs which convert to TTL quadrature. The mouse probably needs a good cleaning/lube and a rubber mouse pad. Hawley mice are a little finicky, which is why getting the Lyon optical mouse going would be a good thing
Connector for the mouse isn't a HD-15 / VGA is it?
Nope. Cannon 2DE19P. They used male instead of female pins in the connector though, which is why the connectors on the back of the keyboard looks so weird (no support around the female pins). There are some 2DE19P's on eBay right now, but you'd have to find male pins.
Very cool! It lives!
Beautiful!
I'm curious about the display monitor. Obviously the refresh rate didn't match up with whatever camera or phone you were using to record it. That's a common problem with old video display technologies, but I've never before seen what this monitor looked like when the computer was actually loading or running a program. Instead of a a straight line of difference between what the screen actually would have looked like in person and what your camera recorded, when the CPU was under load it appeared like the monitor had some sort of wave-like pattern in its refresh. I don't know if that even makes sense to you or anyone, and I'm sorry for being super nerdy, but I am a fan of vintage computers, televisions, game consoles and home video recording and playback machines, and I've never seen a screen do "the wave" like your museum's Alto did in this video. Thank you if you have time to answer, and thank you in any case for a very interesting video!
And using the mouse toward the end of the video seemed to have paused the screen's "wave refresh." You may not have even noticed this happening at the time, since the refresh-interference effect isn't visible to the human eye. If you've never watched your own video, please review it. I know little about the Alto, but I doubt that it had any sort of dedicated video display processor.
@@JMacQ77From what I've learned from these videos, the Alto's hardware runs everything with a scheduler that prioritize some tasks above some others, the users program being the least prioritized one. So it handles one thing at a time, but if one task (for example a disk access) takes a little too much time, the other ones are frozen (including display driver) for a bit more time than usual. So it's no surprise a such hardware produce display artifacts tied to current background "cpu" workload.
Main system clocks are also derived from display refresh circuitry so it may also interfere somewhere.
Alto restoration the movie next fall for the whole family :D
Autumn
Guys! Don't hold the edge connectors so much. You're making me grind my dentures :)
I've seen in a video where these computers could be connected to a LAN and talk to distant computers through a WAN. What kind of networking technology was used in these computers? I know that most PCs today use Ethernet, but I'm sure that has changed over the years.
The team at PARC invented Ethernet as part of the Alto project
Although the protocol used is probably something proprietary. I don't think TCP was available yet.
So, if I am seeing it right, is the CRAM board like a type of L1 cache or a fast scratchpad?
ooh,no i got it, its just an instruction cache more or less.
Micro-instruction store.
15:55. The first screensaver.
marvellous
Oooo yes, the mouse is mousing!
What is going on with your audio? Audio sync seems to be missed by few seconds.
Is it just me or is the drawing program besides from the lack of colors more advanced that the most standard ones from nowadays ... ?
It has strong tools, such as transform by 4 or 6 points, but lacks a freehand draw function. Our next video will show more drawing activity letting you judge it more fully. If you download and use Contralto, you can run the apps on your PC.
Ok thank you for the info :)
thats awesome, great work guys, but can you surf youtube on it?? LOL just kidding :)
writing a simple web browser for it would be cool.
can ya play space invaders on it?
Yes, you can!
Someone did write a Space Invaders for the Alto
Someone wrote Maze Wars for it, too...
Umami Cupcake Not on the Alto.
What about pacman?
Call of duty, too? 😊
nice
WOOOOOW COOOOLLL ))))) :* :* :*
I guess the next order of business is to produce replica ROM and CRAM boards in a proper configuration for this computer and to acquire a proper mouse.
No need for replicas. They get to keep one of my 3K CRAM boards
bitsavers How did you just have Alto parts lying around?
He's been collecting Alto hardware and software for many years.
It looks like it's been lethally injected because the wiring it's red
It's more responsive than my Lisa 2/10!
dip the entire computer in contact cleaner that will solve everything
Lots of exclamation marks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :)
YOU ARE THE BEST !!!